Bookslut

October 2002

Perplexity, Silence and Despair: Three Books on Partition

How does one begin to start writing a column about the Partition? It
was without a doubt the most cataclysmic, life-changing event for South
Asians in this century. Not only did it mean freedom from the British,
not only did it mean borders slitting through what were once neighbors
to make these fledgling enemies: India, Pakistan. Not only did it mean
upheaval of every aspect of life for those migrating from one enemy to
the other. It also meant something else: something dark and raw and potent.
It meant everyday people ripping through their everyday clothing and becoming
the worst part of themselves.

What was it about an essentially political event that caused people
to turn on each other like savage, fantastic beasts? And most chilling
of all: Were they so different from us today? Fifty-five years later,
many people are still looking for answers to that crucial "why?" But perhaps
what distinguishes the best authors dealing with Partition from the rest
is that they do not promote their own answers to an unanswerable question.
Instead, like us, they just do their best to wade through the sticky sludge
of human depravity. They neither explain nor rationalize it but merely
do what storytellers do: they tell the stories.

Because among all the official and unofficial numbers of how-many-hundred-thousand
dead and how-many-more raped, mutilated, robbed - there are stories that
make you want to wake up a different person, if only to try to end the
horror in some small way. Those are the stories worth reading.

Cracking India artfully blends the personal and the societal by
providing us an eyeful of Partition Lahore through Lenny, a young Parsee
girl whose interactions with her Hindu ayah and Muslim ice-candy-man set
the stage for the turmoil erupting around her. Interestingly, Sidhwa generally
holds the carnage and violence at a distance as vague events that flicker
in the background. But this bewildered, hazy child's view is very appropriate
- capturing the perplexity of the times.

Lenny's ayah comes to symbolize for us the proud, earthy beauty of India:
worshipped, hunted, blasphemed and finally defeated into submission. Lenny's
helplessness as she watches it all unravel before her eyes is all the
more poignant because, through her, we realize our incapacity at controlling
our own actions.

No discussion about Partition literature would be complete without touching
upon Train to Pakistan. Hailed by Indian and Western critics alike
as a masterpiece, it could stand on its own as a 20th century novel of
great ability. Its calculated story line, brilliantly crafted characters,
lyricism and musings all render it the status of a modern classic. But
it's more. It's also a treatise on a time by one of its participating
experts.

Singh's prominence as a politician suggests that his work might read
as a patriotic jumble of jingoism and stereotypes. Yet, with this book,
he manages both to shame and appease his audience.

Train to Pakistan is a straightforward, slim novel: perhaps a
reflection of its na´ve villagers or the contained, direct anger of its
premise. Here, events are not filtered through a privileged child's eye
as they are in Cracking India. This novel reveals instead a reality
wedged, like its setting Mano Majra, deep in the heart of the madness.

A motley assortment of characters, each more precisely sculpted than
the last, come together in this fictitious village in India near the newly
formed border with Pakistan. Mano Majra is important because of its railway
station, the villagers setting their schedules by its comings and goings.
Until their idyllic lives are disrupted by the arrival of a silent, unexpected
train. An innocent topic, it would seem. But anyone who knows the horror
wreaked aboard trains during Partition will know what a silent, unlit
train means. Through Singh's measured telling, you will feel the ominous
rumblings of what is to come long before the train rolls into Mano Majra.

His matter of fact descriptions of stomach-churning brutality are no
surprise after a while as we too become numb accomplices, turning our
cheeks. The cries and the bloodshed simply become too numerous to mourn.
But there are still some moments in the book that stick in your throat.
As you shake your head in sure disbelief, you remember that a Punjabi
wrote this, in 1957, and he of all people should know.

Widely regarded as the greatest Urdu short story writer to come out of
South Asia, Manto concentrated a lot of his writing on the event that
broke him. Forced to migrate from his beloved Bombay to Lahore during
Partition, he spent a few short years afterward writing and drinking before
dying of liver disease and despair at age 47. He has written some of the
most memorable, and most disturbing, works on Partition. The short story
Toba Tek Singh is perhaps the best read of these.

It takes place in a lunatic asylum in Lahore, where news of Partition
has just seeped in and sparked hysteria among the inmates. When plans
are announced to ship Hindu and Sikh inmates to an asylum in India, and
bring in Muslims from India, pandemonium breaks loose. One inmate in particular
is frantic about where his village, Toba Tek Singh of the title, is now
located. And this inquiry brings the absurdity of the brand new border
and ensuing migration to a head. This is a fairly recent collection of
some of Manto's greatest work. Most of his stories begin deceptively simply,
soon whipping around to deliver a kick in the groin ending. In all of
them, his part-derisive, part-desolate voice rings true despite the lack
luster translation.

With these selections, I attempted to represent as varied a scale as
possible of styles and approaches. Cracking India affords one the
most intimate look into one family's private grappling with the turmoil.
Train to Pakistan, political fable and social drama in turns, paints
the ravaged Partition Punjab in particular and inhumanity in general.
While Manto the cynic leans back, observes it all with his keen, despairing
eye and tells us each unbearable story, drop by drop.